Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is Germany’s official entry for best foreign language film at next year’s academy awards ceremony. Photograph: Constantin Film/EPA

The bloody legacy of the Baader Meinhof Gang which caused mayhem across West Germany with its politically-motivated assassinations, bombings and kidnappings is to be portrayed on cinema screens this week in a new film which claims to debunk the myth of 1970s terrorist chic.

Just how raw the darkest chapter in Germany's postwar history remains has been demonstrated by the angry reaction that the Baader Meinhof Komplex has prompted from victims' families, the children of gang members and historians.

Some have accused the film - which boasts a cast of top German actors - of being too violent, or of reinforcing the image of gang members as Bonnie and Clyde-style heroes.

Bettina Roehl, the journalist daughter of the gang's co-leader, Ulrike Meinhof, wrote in a blog: "The Baader Meinhof Komplex is the worst-case scenario - it would not be possible to top its hero worship."

The Berliner Zeitung critic said the film had given Andreas Baader, the other gang leader and son of a history professor, the stuntman status he had always craved. "Finally [he] has got what he always wanted. Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film," the critic said.

It was Baader's escape from prison for the fire bombing of two Frankfurt department stores that marked the birth of the Baader Meinhof Gang, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction (RAF). Its members' campaigning zeal was triggered by their anger at their parents' perceived failure to confront Germany's Nazi past.

The Porsche-driving Baader modelled himself on the Hollywood actor Marlon Brando, and he and Meinhof, a successful journalist, epitomised the glamour that gave the gang its appeal - a status it enjoys in popular culture even today.

The film, due for release in Britain and France in November, has been nominated as Germany's entry for the Oscar race. It is the latest attempt to re-examine a period of the country's 20th century history on the screen, following on from recent hits such as Good Bye Lenin, an account of communist East Germany, The Lives of Others and the 2004 film about Hitler's last days, Downfall, produced by Bernd Eichinger, who is also behind the Baader Meinhof Komplex.

Based on a book by the former editor of Spiegel magazine Stefan Aust, who got to know many of the terrorists, the filmmakers say they have tried to make it as "authentic as possible", from the dialogue between gang members - which is partly based on correspondence between them - to the number of bullets fired in each attack. To counter criticism that the film lionises the charismatic gang members while ignoring their victims, the director, Udi Edel, said he positioned the cameras so they would tell the story from the eye level of the victims. "I deliberately put the cameras next to the victims, so that we can see what they see ... to destroy the myth that has grown up around the RAF."

But Michael Buback, the son of Germany's chief federal prosecutor Siegfried who was gunned down by the RAF in 1977, complained that victims' families were not told what events were to be depicted in the film. Buback had to go to see the film to find out that one of the scenes involved the murder of his father. It shows a terrorist posing as a nanny pulling a machine gun from a pram on a Cologne street before shooting the prosecutor and his bodyguards.

"It is cruel that little consideration has been shown towards the family members. We feel we're playing the victim all over again," Buback's son said. Eichinger was also criticised for failing to reveal new information he claimed to have been given about which of the terrorists was responsible for killing Buback.

Jorg Schleyer, the son of the murdered industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, said it was "painful" to watch the re-enactment of his assassination, but praised the film's frankness in portraying the RAF as a "wantonly brutal band of murderers ... without damaging the memory of the victims".

Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, said the film was "heartbreaking" in its authenticity. "[It] has the potential to make people see the RAF in an entirely new light."

But one critic, Jan Schulz-Ojala of Der Tagesspiegel, accused the film's Munich-based production firm of playing the role of a "history waste management machine". "They're taking the radiation waste of the nation and burying it in the dumping ground of moving pictures," he wrote. In a similar vein, the company's next film, Anonymous, tells of the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers after the capture of Berlin in 1945.

Backstory

The Red Army Faction (RAF) also known as the Baader Meinhof Gang after its two leaders, was originally inspired by the 1960s student protests against the Vietnam war and other anti-US demonstrations. When the protesters became radicalised they sought to make their point with bomb attacks, assassinations and kidnappings across West Germany.

Their 34 victims included the leading industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer, the Dresdner Bank head Jurgen Ponto and the federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback. Twenty six members of the RAF died during the campaign.

Many were sentenced to long jail sentences. Baader and Meinhof were among those who committed suicide in Stuttgart's Stammheim prison in 1976. A second RAF generation then took up the fight. The group finally disbanded in 1998.

In recent years the RAF has been celebrated by a wave of "terrorist chic", spawning books, films and paraphernalia including "Prada Meinhof" T-shirts and bags with the group's Heckler and Koch machine gun logo.